Chapter 1: Preface
Date unknown
They keep calling it a ritual.
As if it was sacred. As if I chose any of it.
I’ve read the stories — the ones passed around in whispers, repackaged as “mystical transformation,” as if what happened to me was some consensual act of worship. They talk about salt and longing, about invitations and moans that seal fate.
But none of them describe the tearing.
None of them talk about the thick limbs forcing their way into your cunt, your throat, your ass — all at once. About your body seizing as it fills you, not with love or revelation, but with itself. With the thing that lives beneath the cave.
They say I must have wanted it. That the Sea listens only to those who stray.
Maybe I did stray. Maybe I let my thoughts wander after that night at The Playground — after watching Emily bent over and filled while her husband watched and begged for a turn.
But thinking is not an invitation.
I never said yes.
I screamed. I choked. I fought.
And still it used me.
The ache hasn’t stopped. Not since the cave. Not since the tentacles slid out and left me shaking, dripping, broken. I dream of it. My womb flutters at night. My mouth waters for salt.
But that’s not romance.
That’s infection.
So you can keep your soft poetry. Your rites and your myths.
I was raped by something older than language.
And if it comes for me again...
I don’t know that I’ll run.